ETSI OSM Comes Close to Commercial Reality, Bringing the Benefits of Open Source in the Complex MANO Area

ETSI OSM recently announced Release Four of Open Source Management and Orchestration (OSM MANO), an architectural advancement that constitutes progress in terms of functionality, user experience, and overall maturity of the platform. The first notable enhancement in Release Four is the OSM’s increased independence from the Operational Support System (OSS) layer, building on its innate modular and model-driven architecture. The new release also offers a cloud-native model, a setup that draws on cloud capabilities for resource management and deployment. Equally important in the new release is the discussion around a new Virtual Infrastructure Manager (VIM) plugin model, which mitigates the existence of VIM incompatibilities due to a lack of standard interfaces. This has been a significant and fundamental pain point in early Network Function Virtualization (NFV) deployments, where vendor cloud hardware has been incompatible with third-party VIMs, thus causing compatibility issues in the hardware layer. This has kept early adopters from advancing to higher layers (e.g., Virtual Network Functions [VNF] and NFV Orchestration [NFVO]), and is a reason for the delay in NFV advancement.